Janet Echelman Quotes

#1. It's good for art to make us think, to give us a shared experience that creates a dialogue, makes us talk to each other, including strangers.

Janet Echelman

#2. My sculpture thrives in the context of the city, interacting with people in the course of their daily lives.

Janet Echelman

#3. When ideas are young and vulnerable, criticism can be lethal.

Janet Echelman

#4. The spaces I want to be in are nurturing and soft and saturated with color. Our cities don't have enough of that, and as humans we need it.

Janet Echelman

#5. I believe people can have a profound experience by being surrounded by something beautiful - that's what I aim for. My sculpture is about the way you feel when you're standing under it and inside it. It's experiential art.

Janet Echelman

#6. I believe that public space should be intentional: it should be obvious that you belong.

Janet Echelman

#7. When developing an idea, I remind myself not to start with compromise. I envision the ideal manifestation of the idea, as if I had no limits in resources, materials, or permission.

Janet Echelman

#8. As a child, I always enjoyed building forts by stringing up bed sheets and clothes. I continue to be inspired by makeshift structures, including my own kids' forts and temporary architecture of all sorts.

Janet Echelman

#9. My whole career I've been interested by the distinction between an emotional and an intellectual response to an artwork.

Janet Echelman

#10. In Portugal, my sculpture 'She Changes' refers to the town's fishing history, to the era of seafaring trade and discovery. The contemporary site is industrial, surrounded by red and white striped smokestacks, which is mirrored in the pattern of the sculpture.

Janet Echelman

#11. In Amsterdam, the river and canals have been central to city life for the last four centuries.

Janet Echelman

#12. Advances in technology have opened up possibilities in the cultural realm throughout history. I'm intrigued by developments in technology - as an artist it gives me a new palette to explore.

Janet Echelman

#13. I never studied sculpture, engineering or architecture. In fact, after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven.

Janet Echelman

#14. Once I began to hear and pay attention to my fledgling ideas, the biggest hurdle was to learn how to respect them. That was hard, because the real way to respect an idea is to invest the attention and work needed to develop it.

Janet Echelman

#15. The most powerful part of the art is experiential, yet it's the hardest to describe because it's nonverbal.

Janet Echelman

#16. I pay two full-time assistants in my studio, plus consultants who are architects, engineers, and landscape architects, as well as lighting designers.

Janet Echelman

#17. Whether being battered by the surf or swimming through the gentle undulating surface of lakes, I find inspiration in the movement of water. Sometimes I think about the journey the water has traveled, reconnecting me to the larger cycles of nature.

Janet Echelman

#18. In my regular life, I am very involved in commissions for cities and sometimes countries. And I think of public art as a team sport. The outcome is only possible with the interaction of all the players.

Janet Echelman

#19. My monumental netted sculptural environments move through time, animated by an ever-changing 'wind choreography,' making invisible air currents suddenly visible to the human eye. I make living, breathing pieces that respond to the forces of nature - wind, light, water.

Janet Echelman

#20. You can't stumble upon something new and wonderful if you don't have time to stumble.

Janet Echelman